Pfizer’s Vaccine Protection Against Omicron Fades Weeks After 2nd and 3rd Doses
forbes.com
forbes.com
> Experts and regulators broadly acknowledge the benefits of a third vaccine dose to top up flagging protection against serious illness and death.
We have this wonderfully adaptable mRNA vaccine technology - but we've backed ourselves into a corner re: COVID-19 because it seems "original antigenic sin" is a stubbornly real effect in this context. All current research points to updated vaccines inducing largely the same old immune response - they are not more effective than just dosing again with the original shot.
So we can "reprogam" the vaccine but getting the immune system to do something different turns out to be more difficult.
Where it get interesting at a population level is that nearly everybody now has these antibodies for the original spike. At a population level this seems less robust than natural immunity[1], which would have induced (again at the population level) a broader range of immune responses from sites all over the virus. You also would have had a population where some people were exposed to original, some to delta, some to omicron etc, again leading to greater antibody diversity.
In general, monocultures tend to be less resilient to "exponential attacks" than more diverse systems.
While public health authorities have repeatedly dismissed this concern, I still find it hard to believe this kind of "antibody monoculture" isn't going to have an effect on subsequent evolution of the virus.
Mass vaccination was almost certainly the right call from an immediate public health perspective but I can't help but feel it's also left us more vulnerable in some difficult-to-predict way for the long term.
[1] Agree, it's bad terminology but everyone understands it. It's all "natural" immunity, of course.
All vaccines are based on the previous previous variant too.
It's possible that RMNA doesn't really trigger vaccine immunity though. But that's not a fact.
I mean, I guess it's great that we're allowed to point out the truth now -- though of course you're still not allowed to say that people should consider not getting booster doses.
My local county's public health department has been tracking infection rates by number of vaccine doses for a fairly long time. The unvaccinated have the highest rate of infection (per capita), but among the vaccinated, interestingly, the more doses you've had the higher your risk of infection. It wasn't always that way -- the graph showed that folks with a booster dose did better than folks without for about two months after the boosters came out -- but ever since then, it's been a very clear curve, more doses = more covid (but any doses is better than zero doses)
I wonder if having a recent dose makes people engage in activities that puts them at a higher risk of Covid. I guess it can be tested by randomly distributing placebos among the real vaccines, though that obviously has ethical implications.
That said, all of the people that I know who still are living under self-imposed lockdown all have the maximum number of doses for which they are eligible. I don't know enough people to be a statistically significant source of info, but you would expect that the group most afraid of covid should be maximally vaccinated.
But also it might be that maximally -vaccinated individuals also test most frequently, and between a false-positive rate and just the fact that these days most infections are nearly or completely asymptomatic, they're just testing positive more often and not actually infected more often.
It's all very hard to disambiguate, other than that it is clear that vaccine doses given not-recently must not have a large beneficial effect on likelihood to be infected.
Likelihood to be hospitalized is potentially different, but that data is a mess too, because we don't collect data on whether the person hospitalized was admitted for covid or was admitted for something else and then tested positive at admission.
During the Omicron surge in the winter, Los Angeles county estimated that about 75-80% of those hospitalized were hospitalized for non-covid-related conditions and just happened to also be positive for covid. But that data isn't available with any data quality.
The only thing that can be said about COVID vaccine, is that the first two doses are the most useful. After that it looks like the law of diminishing returns kicks in.
Your county's data is likely co-founded by other factors, assuming it is accurate.
The problem has been those who would try to thwart effective public health response (e.g. by spreading fud about boosters). Largely the motivation is ideological - if the People, represented by the State, could fix Covid with concerted action for the benefit of the whole community, then perhaps they could fix other things, like wealth and racial inequality.
I guess we will start with "the people" is not in any way shape or form "the government".
"that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" - Abraham Lincoln.
Certainly that is the principle we've been following in Europe - did something go wrong in the US?
But it is certainly not true now.
The government of the present day is primarily an antagonist of the people, extracting the maximum of wealth and power that it can without enduring a revolt.
Only reason I got the booster shot was the hassle of not getting it, e.g. having to do test 2-3 times/week.
With booster shot the COVID pass would be valid, never mind that the vaccine doesn't prevent you from infecting others.